A relic of the peak Pussy Posse era is back in mainstream discussions this week.
That relic, a largely improvised independent project put together in the mid-90s and starring Leonardo DiCarpio and Tobey Maguire, is the subject of a New York Post piece published Monday that's now giving other publications plenty to pull from in the holy name of aggregation.
The piece in question claims to cite court documents and deposition footage from post-production legal action, touching on moments in the film the stars allegedly felt weren't in the best interests of furthering their careers at the time.
Don's Plum was a group of friends saying, 'Let’s all make a movie …,'" producer Dale Wheatley told the Post. "In many ways, [it] was a love letter to our friends."
The black-and-white shoot occurred across a total of six days, sporadically between July 1995 and March 1996, and sees DiCaprio and Maguire portraying two characters who gather with friends at a Los Angeles area diner every weekend. Among the highlights of the film with an ultimately highly contested release are DiCaprio's Derek character saying lines like "I'll fucking throw a bottle at your face, you goddamn whore" and "Do you girls masturbate at all?"
Maguire's Ian is also said to get some would-be screen time via a scrapped sequence in which the character details habits of the masturbatory variety and whatnot.
Tawd Beckman, another producer, notes the obvious fact that acting in a movie requires said actors to, you know, portray characters. However, Beckman conceded that the "free-flowing" nature of the project may have warped some viewers' images of DiCaprio and Maguire, an argument that's believed to have at least partially inspired later legal action.
DiCaprio was reportedly convinced this project with friends would, at best, become a film school-esque short of an experimental nature. When a feature-length cut was completed including footage shot after DiCaprio's scenes were finished, problems started to arise. DiCaprio, Wheatley said, was initially pushing back against a feature, but expressed renewed enthusiasm after a screening.
When Maguire and his team learned of the project's increased ambitions, things reportedly got worse again.
Maguire is ultimately said to have accused Wheatley and others of attempting to use his and DiCaprio's rising star status to attain their own and shared this assessment with DiCaprio. After release deals started collapsing, Wheatley and others filed a $10 million suit against the actors in which it was alleged they had devised a campaign strategy aimed at dismantling such deals and effectively tanking the project.
Allegedly, DiCaprio and Maguire later counter-sued, with a subsequent settlement reached in which certain lines were removed (including Maguire's character's "I beat off and I stick my pinky up, not in my ass") and an agreement was established in which release here in the States and in Canada was not allowed. Don's Plum, however, did bag a Berlin Film Festival showing in 2001.
For the record, the Post piece also includes a statement from a DiCaprio rep saying comments from Wheatley (who also says Maguire "ruined' his life and that the Pussy Posse is really "the Bully Posse") are "decades-old lies" designed to garner attention and financial gain.
At any rate, the Post piece in question is available in full here, as is another one from the publication that's effectively a critical takedown.
